


bottom of the bay

by juggyjones



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Detectives, F/M, it took a much different turn than i planned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 13:07:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13318776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juggyjones/pseuds/juggyjones
Summary: Bellamy left the agency thirteen months ago.It shouldn't hurt so much.





	bottom of the bay

Bellamy left the Arkadia Private Investigation and Personal Security Agency on December 2, 2016. 

It's January 9, 2018 today. Clarke still searches for his face in the crowd on her way to work. 

She knows it should've stopped hurting a long time ago. They only dated for four years (four years, three months, twenty days) when he left everything he knew with a letter. Raven called him an asshole and Clarke would have done the same had she been herself, and not drunk off her arse.

One. That's how many times she allowed herself to slip up in her seven years as a private investigator. 

She should've gotten fired. Everyone knows that, or maybe they don't give a rat's arse about what goes on with her.

It's been thirteen months. She doesn't see his face around or in the building. 

The realization hurts every time. A little less, always too much.

Monroe - her boss, Kane's secretary - walks up to Clarke. Her brown hair is let down and her eyes bloodshot, but Clarke can't really find it in herself to care about this girl who means nothing to her.

"Kane needs you," Monroe says. "It's urgent."

It's always urgent with Kane, so Clarke doesn't worry. Nor does she go to Kane's office, or even give Monroe so much as an answer.

Clarke has had a shitty thirteen months, but this week has been even shittier, okay. She knows what Kane wants to talk about and she doesn't want to talk about it.

It's not her goddamn fault she's not the only PI tracking this guy.

Clarke's office looks bland, to put it nicely. It has a wall of windows and glass door and the whole room is pretty damn small, but she spends hardly any time in it so it isn't that bad. Her desk is in the middle and a god-awful desk chair to go along, and she swears the computer is at least a decade old. She could get a new one, if she wanted. 

She just really doesn't like change. Besides, she's grown fond of Lexa, as she calls it. Reminds her of a cute, super intelligent, robotic-like girl she hooked up with during college. 

There are no pictures on her desk. Nothing.

Blandness isn't prone to change. Blandness cannot be changed. Blandness remains constant no matter what.

Clarke loves her office.

Raven barges in about a minute after Clarke settles into her chair, hair tied up in a braid.

She doesn't look much better than Monroe. "Where the fuck you think you are, Griffin? Kane is pissed."

"Monroe told me," Clarke says. "I'll be there in a minute."

"Um, Clarke. You don't have a minute."

Raven looks like she would kill her if she could, so Clarke tags along to Kane's office. The atmosphere in the agency is sullen this morning, instead of the usual hectic business.

"What is going on?"

"No idea," Raven mutters. "Nobody wants to say shit until all of us few are in the office."

"Who?"

"You, me, Monty, Jasper, Miller."

Her previous unit - back when they worked on more intense cases. There's only one person from the unit whose name Raven didn't mention and he's been gone for a very long time.

Neither of the girls says anything else. 

Kane's office is in the other part of the building, the one higher up. It takes them about two minutes to get there and it's a long walk. By the end of it, Clarke feels weary. 

She also feels dread. 

Everyone is in the office when they come in. Kane looks like someone shot him in the chest or he's having a cardiac arrest, and looks each of them in the eye for an odd amount of time when the girls sit down.

Clarke hates the quiet.

Jasper breaks it. "Kane. What is going on?"

But Kane isn't the one to answer. Instead, another person enters the office and it's someone Clarke would expect the least - John Murphy.

Bellamy's partner.

Murphy sits on an empty chair, next to Clarke, and looks at the floor between his feet. 

He looks like shit.

Clarke notices she's been thinking that about others a lot. She probably doesn't look much better herself.

John Murphy, however, absolutely does look like shit by all means. Half of his face is mangled and he limped when he entered, with his left hand hidden beneath his denim jacket and knuckles on the right hand each and every battered, bruised and bleeding. 

She hasn't seen Murphy in nearly a month. 

"Right," says Monty. "What."

Kane gives a deep nod. "Murphy."

 And so Murphy tells them. It begins thirteen months ago and it begins on December 2, with a letter. It's an undercover op, two-man thing, greater good stuff. Dangerous as fuck, mind the language. 

Nobody cares about the language.

It was supposed to last a month, tops. Follow some guys, find intel on others, interrogate some here and there. And with that, they were done after two weeks - but Bellamy wanted more. 

So he got more.

When Murphy tells them Bellamy joined the most notorious criminal gang in the whole of Virginia, if not the US, nobody is surprised. It's not what they expected, but it isn't what they wouldn't expect from Bellamy.

"He's always wanted to be a hero," Clarke says. Quietly.

It's the first she spoke of him since he left. It's not like he really left anyway.

Murphy talks more. He talks of him being the inside man with the Agency and providing Bellamy with the info he needed, and he talks of Bellamy climbing the ranks like a rocket. It makes Raven laugh, then she explains to him that's not how rockets work.

Nobody really cares about that, either.

Bellamy was going to take them out by himself. Clarke never found him to be braver, or stupider. 

They figured him months ago, but he didn't know. Nobody did  So they dug up info on him, Murphy says, because that's the only way they could've known the shit they knew. But they liked him and they liked to keep him on a leash, so they just had the info ready. 

The plan was set in motion when they realized Bellamy is a bigger threat than they thought. 

Murphy doesn't talk anymore. Everyone is quiet and looking at Clarke and this is when she realizes that this wasn't why they are here.

He looks right at her. "It gets worse."

She knows that.

"Talk," Miller says. Bellamy's best friend.

Murphy does, looking at Clarke.

They knew about her. They knew she, along with his sister who lived in Africa and was out of reach, was the only thing they could use to really hurt him.

So they gave her a job. She wasn't going to make it out alive.

She likes to think she knew it. The second PI, someone who is almost as good as her sometimes and better at others.

But she couldn't have known.

He never stopped protecting her, even if he didn't know who he was protecting her from. Her client was a rival mob leader and if she was made, Clarke wouldn't have lived another day. He took on the mob's attention to himself by pretending to be another PI so they wouldn't look her way. He disrupted her own mission and her own goal so she wouldn't get in his way of saving her. 

Murphy didn't know all of that. He guessed, because everyone knows how much Bellamy loves Clarke. 

And so does the mob. 

"Cut to the chase," Clarke says. She can't listen to this anymore. 

She knows what happens next. She knows that Murphy wouldn't be here, telling them all of this looking like he does if something hadn't gone terribly wrong. And Bellamy isn't here and every time Murphy says his name - not often, Clarke notes - he winces. His eyes are guilty. It's enough for Clarke to draw a solid conclusion and it's enough for everyone else, because they're not employed in the best damn private investigation agency in the goddamn country for nothing. 

"They got him."

Raven nods. Hard-boiled-detective face on. "When? How? What happened next? How do you know that?"

Clarke can't bring herself to say anything.

"It's Finn," Murphy says. Raven and Clarke take a deep breath, but that's all.

He used to be undercover in the other mob and he got in too deep and couldn't tell apart right from wrong anymore. He saw Bellamy, recognized it, connected two and two. He called Bellamy to warn him but he was long gone and Murphy couldn't do much to save him. It hasn't been three weeks since their last meeting. Nobody knows, at that point, where he is. 

And they're tracking Finn's calls but he doesn't know that.

He should've thought about that. It happened so fast. Finn's off the maps and Bellamy was, too, until few hours ago when they came into his apartment and trashed it and trashed Murphy because he was in it. A threat, that's all they gave, a promise they don't treat to anyone outside their family meddling into their own business. 

They got him. And by now he might be long gone, or using Finn to get in. 

Murphy doesn't know. 

"Clarke," says Kane, "I needed you to hear this. You're taking Blake's position."

"I'm not."

"You are," says Raven. 

Monty agrees. And so does Miller. Jasper, too.

It's settled. 

Raven gets up. The part of her leg that's prosthetic doesn't appear odd to anyone through her sweatpants, but Clarke can see it because that's what happened the one time he was't there and she had to lead the team instead of him. That's what happens when she tries to be him. 

All of them leave to get ready. Murphy's writing down the intel they got and anything anyone might know about Bellamy's whereabouts, but it's not much and Clarke doesn't think the operation is going to be a success. So Murphy takes her aside when Kane leaves to grab the three of them some coffee, and looks like he'd rather be anywhere but here.

Clarke doesn't doubt that. Murphy is not a team player.

"You're the only one who can find him - the five of you. I know a guy. I know where we could find Finn. But the danger is going to be off the charts and the operation is going to be more than you've ever had to do. Kane can't know the full extent."

She's not doing it. She tells him that, and he grits her teeth.

"No. You are. Because it's Bellamy Blake we're talking about."

He's wrong.

"I'm not wrong. You'd break every rule to find him."

She likes to think she wouldn't. 

Twenty minutes later, she has broken the first rule by refusing to tell Kane anything about the mission. She's armed her team with Raven's best and everything her boyfriend, Wick, has come up with. Bulletproof vests and personal information vanished, they are ghosts now.

Clarke likes how it feels.

They know the operation is much bigger than just Bellamy Blake. They know that what they did would turn them into criminals, enemies of the state. Of the nation. When Murphy joins them and Wick is their inside man, it's six of them and they're ready to not be anyone for a while.

They go rogue. It feels good. 

They find Finn within a week, cowering somewhere in Albania. He tells them everything they need to know and Raven slams him in the head with the butt of her pistol before they take him in and he's the seventh member of the rogue team. 

They kill people. They find people who know people who know people who have heard of people who might have Bellamy. They follow the trail as long as it leads them somewhere and they find Lincoln, an addition to their team, and they find Anya who brings in Lexa and suddenly they're more of an organisation than a team. 

They're not fighting for Bellamy only. They are fighting for honor and freedom and it may not look like it, but deep down they're the good guys who need to do some bad things to make the world a better place. 

They don't expect to find Bellamy's sister, Octavia, on a crusade of her own.

It's not long until she joins them.

It takes them a year to find Bellamy. 

Clarke leads them. It's a long battle because he's no longer just a prisoner, but an active part of the mob. Both of them, they soon realize, he's the leader of both of them. And when they find him, with gun directed towards Clarke and no mercy in his eyes, they wish they didn't. 

He looks just like Finn. A bullet gone astray. Shadow who can't tell right from wrong. 

A lost man.

Nobody shoot. 

"Bellamy."

"Clarke."

More of Bellamy's backup comes in and her team disperses around the complex to get rid of them. Somebody gets through some of them and Bellamy shoots him before he can fire at Clarke. 

Without mercy.

They don't talk for long. They both protect Clarke, shooting at anyone who tries to shoot at her. She doesn't understand it.

"I did it to protect you."

He did. It doesn't make it any better.

"I'm not one of them."

It doesn't look like that.

"Clarke-" BANG. "-I'm trying to do the right thing."

"What is the right thing?" BANG.

"A world without people like them." BANG. "Without mobs."

"You're their leader."

BANG. "I am competent. They fear me."

"They have every right to do so." BANG. "I don't recognize you."

"I am still the man you fell in love with."

He isn't.

He is. 

"End it."

"I can't. I need more time."

"Take them out," Clarke says. "With us. Become one of us."

"A Grounder?"

"A warrior."

They take the fall five minutes later. Jasper is dead and Monty is going to be in a few hours and Clarke sees it in Bellamy's face he knows it's his fault. Raven's prosthetic leg got blown off. Anya is dead. Lexa tries to kill Bellamy and Clarke takes her off him, because Bellamy is the only reason why any of them are still alive. 

Both mobs are out for their blood. 

Bellamy presses his lips to her forehead when he lets the survivors leave. "Give me three months."

Monty isn't with them.

True to his word, three months later, a massive explosion in Western Virginia is on every news in the world. Few survivors, all in critical state. More than five hundred dead. They know who committed the crime and Bellamy is dubbed a terrorist, but it doesn't matter because when the Grounders - or what's left of them - visit him in the hospital, he's as good as dead. Recovering, possibly he might live, but he's scarred physically and emotionally to the point of no recognition.

Octavia presses her head into Lincoln's chest so her brother doesn't see her cry. 

The rest of the team takes over the hospital. They kill those Bellamy failed to. 

Clarke knows what he needs her to do. 

She doesn't let anyone be in Bellamy's room, not even Octavia, and she tries to be strong for him. 

He smiles when he realizes what she's doing and what she's going to do and she think she can see painful honesty and thankfulness when she looks into his eyes. Her own heart is breaking because she doesn't recognize him when she presses a kiss onto his lips.

"I told you I'd needed more time."

"Shh," Clarke says. She wants him to brush his lips against her collarbone like the did the morning when he left, but he'll never do it again. She smiles through tears. "Don't talk."

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

He smiles. She can see it pains him to do it, but they both know the pain is going to be over soon. 

His hand finds hers. "This is the goodbye we never got."

"The one you never gave me," she corrects. "You're an idiot."

"I was going to marry you."

"And you left."

"Because I wanted to do the job."

"You could've come home two weeks later."

"No," he says, "I couldn't. There's no coming back from that. There's no home anymore. If I came back, they would've killed all of you because I couldn't do the job without exposing myself. So I played their game. I played my part, like you played yours. There's no coming back for you, either, is it?"

Clarke smiles. "No. There isn't." Her fingers brush against his lips. They're dry and bloated and she loves them still. "I haven't had a home since you left."

"You could've gone on with your life."

"I couldn't." It's the truth. "I am happy where I am right now."

"Watching me die?"

"Being with you. Saving the world one crazy lover at a time."

"I'm past saving."

"You aren't, Bellamy."

She was going to kill him. Cut the machines keeping him alive. Watch him breathe on his own, live on his own, with her, for even so much as few shaky breaths. 

That's what she was going to do. But she changed her mind.

He is a hero, not a terrorist. He should live.

Clarke kisses him, one last time. Bellamy tries to stop her even though he doesn't know what she's planning to do. She injects an anesthetic into his body and he falls asleep with her lips to his bandaged forehead. 

She needed him to know she loves him and now he does.

Clarke writes a letter and climbs to the top of the hospital. She lived a great life, but she did more evil than Bellamy ever could. At the end of the day, she is the one who can no longer tell right from wrong - not Bellamy. Not Finn. 

She knows she is no hero.

So she writes a letter and holds it above her head when helicopters start hovering at the hospital. She holds a gun to her temple and forces someone to come down. It should've ended that way, with her getting into that helicopter, someone reading her letter and her ending in a prison for the rest of her life. Or being capital punishment, either. 

She sits with a man dubbed the Chancellor and knows it's no police whose helicopter she's in. She realizes Bellamy hasn't killed them all. They're still around them, rotting and spreading their stench to kind people, good people. 

The Chancellor is kinder than she expects. He gives the letter to the police, because he is the head of the FBI. 

And the shot in her head is clean, precise, and painless.

Bellamy Blake is cleared of all guilt and comes to a recovery just in time to testify against Clarke Griffin, a terrorist. He does so with a heavy heart but know tarnishing her last deed would destroy her sacrifice. So all Grounders turn their story into being manipulated by her, blackmailed, and do it well enough so none of them get anything more than two years of jail. Bellamy walks free.

Free from official guilt. Ridden with guilt of his mistakes being what killed the woman he was going to marry. 

Nobody cares about that.

He soon realizes his job isn't done and he brings the Grounders back, assembles them like Clarke has. He's no leader like her, but he does the job well enough they become well-known vigilantes getting rid of the scum of the world. Nobody knows who they are, or if they do, they don't care. That's the only way he can live up to her memory because to Bellamy, Clarke was a greater hero than he could ever be.

He visits her grave every month. It never ceases to hurt.

It's a bodyless grave.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry.


End file.
